See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/225729900

Perception of clicks in music

Article  in  Attention Perception & Psychophysics · January 1977

DOI: 10.3758/BF03199545

CITATIONS READS

20 25

1 author:

Andrew H. Gregory
The University of Manchester
25 PUBLICATIONS   590 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Ear dominance for pitch View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Andrew H. Gregory on 29 June 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Perception & Psychophysics
1978, Vol. 24 (2),171-174

Perception of clicks in music

ANDREW H. GREGORY
University ofManchester, Manchester M13 9PL, England

Subjects were asked to judge the position of a click that occurred during a short piece of
music. Clicks were, on average, judged to be later than their actual position. The click and
the music were presented through headphones to different ears, and the clicks were judged .
to be significantly later if they arrived at the right ear rather than at the left. There was also'
a significant tendency for clicks to be attracted to phrase boundaries in the music. These last ~
two results are similar to those from experiments with a click during speech, but the late'
judgments of a click in music contrast with the early judgments of a click in speech.

There are several interesting analogies between the
perception of music and the perception of language.
In particular, the grouping of items into phrases is an
important principle for both. Sloboda (1977) has
studied the eye-hand span of musicians sight-reading
music from a projected slide by occluding the slide,
and found that they tended to continue playing up to
a phrase boundary. This is analogous to the experiment
by Levin and Kaplan (1970) on eye-voice span for sub-
jects reading prose, who tended to continue reading to
a phrase boundary when the text was removed.
Similarly, Sloboda (1976) found that errors in both
musical and verbal texts were least likely to be detected
near the middle of words or musical phrases.
One well-known perceptual effect related to linguistic
phrases is the demonstration by Fodor and Bever (1965)
that the apparent location of a click presented during
a spoken sentence tends to be displaced towards a
phrase boundary or syntactic break. Reber and
Anderson (1970) confirmed this effect when the sen-
tence was read with normal intonation, but not in a
monotone, thus emphasizing the linguistic nature of the
effect. They, and Reber (1973), also used a control
group, who were asked to guess the position of nonex-
istent clicks, and found that a high proportion of these.
responses also occurred at syntactic breaks. They sug-
gested that the effect was at least partly due to response
bias, but one can argue that even this response bias
demonstrates the psychological reality of linguistic
segments.
Another effect found by Fodor and Bever (1965)
is that if the click and the sentence are presented
through headphones to different ears, the click tends
to be judged earlier when it arrives at the left ear and
the sentence to the right than for the opposite condi-
tion. This has been confirmed by Bertelson and Tisseyre
(1972), who found that clicks were, on average, per-
ceived 1 syllable early (0.14 sec) if they came to the
left ear, with the sentence to the right, and about 0.6
syllable early (0.09 sec) if they came to the right ear.
There is also a general tendency to judge the click as
earlier than its actual position. Ladefoged and Broadbent
(1960), in the original paper on the phenomenon, found
that, on average, the click was reported 1 syllable early
when the click and the sentence came through loud-
speakers. Bertelson and Tisseyre (1970), also using
loudspeakers, found that the click was perceived about
I syllable early if there was no prior knowledge of the
sentence, and 0.3 syllable early if there was prior knowl-
edge. However, Bertelson and Tisseyre (1975) also
found that if subjects had no warning that a click was
to be presented, the click was perceived as late if it was
presented from a loudspeaker to the right of the subject
and the speech from the left.
If the perception of music is basically similar to that
of speech, then one would expect the apparent position
of a click presented during music to vary in a similar
manner to that of a click during speech. However, the
ear asymmetry effect may be related to cerebral dom-
inance for language, and its direction for a click in music
would then depend upon which cerebral hemisphere
mediates the perception of music.
The evidence concerning hemispheric dominance
and the perception of melodic sequences is not con-
clusive, and has recently been well reviewed in chapters
by Benton (1977), Damasio and Damasio (1977),
and Wyke (1977). Neurological evidence shows that
receptive amusia may exist with or without aphasia,
and may result from left- or right-sided temporal lesions.
Milner (1962) found that tonal memory and some other
musical abilities were impaired by excision of the right
temporal lobe, but not the left. Gordon (1974) mentions
two cases of hemispherectomy, in one of which the
removal of the right hemisphere left speech unimpaired
but caused severe deficits in musical abilities, 'while
in the other, removal of the left hemisphere impaired
speech but had little effect upon musical abilities.
Psychological evidence comes mainly from dichotic
listening studies, where superior performance by one ear
is assumed to reflect mediation by the contralateral
hemisphere, Kimura (1964) found a left-ear superiority
for recognizing dichotic melodies, as opposed to a right

171
172 GREGORY
ear superiority for dichotic digits. However, Gordon
(1970), using musically experienced subjects, found
no significant difference between the ears for dichotic
melodies, although there was a left-ear dominance for
recognizing dichotic chords. Bever and Chiarello (1974),
on a monaural listening task, found that musically
experienced subjects were more accurate with the right
ear, and nonmusical subjects better with the left ear.
One possible explanation of these results is that
musical subjects may tend to recognize the whole tune,
while nonmusical subjects may rely more on recognizing
individual notes, and that these two tasks may be
mediated by the left and right hemisphere, respectively.
This would agree with the general idea (Efron, 1963)
that the left hemisphere is specialized for temporal
tasks, whether linguistic or nonlinguistic. This has been
supported by Halperin, Nachshon, and Carmon (1973),
who found a right-ear dominance for recognizing
dichotic three-tone sequences with two transitions,
and by Papcun, Krashen, Terbeek, Remington, and
Harshman (1974), who found a right-ear dominance for
trained Morse operators recognizing dichotic Morse
code signals. This idea would predict that the ear asym-
metry effect for a click in music would be in the same
direction as for a click in speech, that is, the click would
be judged earlier when it arrived in the left ear than
when it arrived in the right.
METHOD
One problem with experiments on music perception is that
the majority of people are not well trained at sight-reading
music. It was decided for this initial study to use subjects un-
selected for musical ability and to use the same short tune on
each trial. The subjects were shown the musical notation for
a short tune consisting of six notes of equal duration, and even
nonmusical subjects were confident at indicating the position
of the click. Figure I shows one of the tunes used. In order to
study the effects of phrase boundaries, half the subjects were
told to think of the tune as two triplets and were shown the
notation in Figure la, while the others were told to think of
three pairs of notes and were shown the notation in Figure lb.
o.
b.
Figure 1. The two modes of visual presentation for one of
the tunes used.
It was thus predicted that clicks on the third and fourth notes
would be heard in the intervening pause in the first case and in
the earlier or later pauses in the second case. This method has
the advantage that the phrase boundary is entirely perceptual
and does not coincide with a long acoustic pause.
Stimuli
Each stimulus consisted of a six-note tune delivered to one
ear and a click to the other ear. The tunes consisted of a set of
pure tones generated by a Modular One computer connected
to a Leak stereo amplifier through a DAC synchronized to an
external crystal oscillator. The frequencies of the notes were
those of the natural scale (A = 440 Hz). Three different tunes
were used: 0) G, C, G, D, B, G; (2) B, F, C, G, D, C; and
(3) F, G, D, B, F, C. (D = 297 Hz, F = 352 Hz, G = 396 Hz,
B = 495 Hz, C = 528 Hz).
The tunes were presented at two speeds. At the slow rate,
the duration of each note was 200 msec and at the fast rate
100 msec. The notes were separated by pauses of the same
duration as the notes themselves. Each note had a rise and fall
time of about 10 msec, and all were of equal amplitude. The
clicks were produced by a square wave of 0.1 msec duration,
on the opposite channel from the tune, and were positioned
precisely in the middle of either a note or a pause.
For each of the three tunes, a tape was prepared comprising
2 slow practice trials, with the duration of notes and pauses
being 400 msec, then 18 slow trials followed by 18 fast trials.
Each tune was followed by a 7-sec pause and preceded by a
200-msec warning tone (G) on both channels 2 sec before
the tune.
Each block of 18 trials included 9 with the tune to the left
ear and 9 to the right, in randomized order. Clicks, on the
opposite ear, were positioned at the center of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,
or 5th note or the pauses in between them. There were two
clicks at each of these seven positions, except the 3rd and 4t"
notes, which had four clicks in order to increase the accuracy
of analysis of phrase boundary effects. The order of these click
positions was randomized in each block of 18 trials.
The tape was played on a Sony TC·377 tape recorder, using
TDH-39 headphones matched to ±2 dB. The intensity of the
tones was 80 dB SPL, measured with an artificial ear (Bruel
& Kjaer Type 4152) and a sound-level meter (Bruel & Kjaer
Type 2203). The click was examined on an oscilloscope con-
nected to the output of the sound-level meter, and was found
to be a biphasic spike of 1.5 msec duration, with approximately
equal amplitude excursions in both positive and negative direc-
tions. The peak-to-peak amplitude was five times that of the
tone measured in the same way.
Procedure
Thirty-six young right-handed adult subjects with normal
hearing participated in the experiment. Each tune was heard
by 12 subjects, for half of whom the headphones were reversed.
For each of these six groups of subjects, half were told to
think of the tune as two triplets and half as three pairs of notes.
The subjects were asked to point to the note or the pause
between notes where they thought the click had occurred.
RESULTS
Each response was scored according to the number of
intervals (notes and pauses) after the stimulus. Thus,
a click during the third note would be scored as +2
if it was reported on the fourth note, and as -1 if on
the pause before the third note.
Table I shows the numbers of early, equal, and late
responses, and the mean apparent delay of the click
converted to milliseconds. The results are summed over

Table I
Early Equal Late Delay*
Click-R 106 306 236
Click-L 143 320 185
Combined 249 626 421
"Mean apparent delay in milliseconds.
Table 2
Frequency of Responses to Clicks on the Third and Fourth
Notes that Fall in Central or Outer Pauses
Perceived Central Outer
Pattern Pause Pauses
2 X 3 Notes 78 57
3 X 2 Notes 59 76
all stimuli for all subjects and are analyzed for ear of
presentation.'
Overall, late responses are much more frequent than
early ones, and this difference is highly significant on
a binomial test (z = 6.7, p < .001).
The mean subjective delay of the click was 30 msec.
There was no significant difference between the results
of 20 of the subjects who had received some training
at reading music and those of the 16 subjects who had
had no musical training.
There were more late and fewer early responses when
the click was presented to the right ear and the tune
to the left than in the reverse condition.
This asymmetry between the ears is significant
(i = 10.85, p < .001). The mean apparent delay
with the click to the right ear was 43 msec and with
the click to the left ear, 17 msec.
To study the effect of phrase boundaries, responses
to all the clicks occurring during the third and fourth
notes were examined. Only the responses in a pause
adjacent to the note on which the click occurred were
analyzed. Responses were classified as being in the
central pause, between the third and fourth notes, or
in one of the two outer pauses, either before the third
note or after the fourth. The central pause corresponds
to a phrase boundary when the notes are perceived in
two groups of three, while the outer pauses are both
phrase boundaries when the notes are perceived in three
groups of two. Table 2 shows the result of this analysis
for relevant responses from the 18 subjects under each
condition.
For both perceptual conditions, responses are more
frequent at the phrase boundaries, and this is a signif-
icant tendency (X2 = 4.8, p < .05).
DISCUSSION
Clicks do not seem to be attracted towards phrase
boundaries, suggesting that the perception of music,
as of speech, is organized into phrases. This effect,
PERCEPTION OF CLICKS IN MUSIC 173
although significant, is not very marked, but this may
be partly due to the fact that not all subjects perceived
the phrases in the way suggested by the experimenter.
43 The most interesting result is that the click is, on
17
30 average, perceived later than its actual time of occur-
rence, whereas with speech it is usually perceived earlier.
Ladefoged and Broadbent (1960) invoked Titchener's
(1909) law of prior entry: "The stimulus for which we
are predisposed requires less time than a like stimulus,
for which we are unprepared, to produce its full
conscious effect." However, on this principle, listeners
would surely be predisposed towards (or attend"'mg to)
the stimulus which commences first, that is, the sentence
or the music, and it is the click which should be delayed.
The principle thus does not support the early perception
of a click in speech, but does support the late perception
of a click in music. It may well be that there are special
linguistic processes which produce a delay in speech
perception relative to nonlinguistic stimuli.
The ear asymmetry effect appears to be in the same
direction for both music and speech. Clicks tend to be
perceived earlier if they arrive at the left ear, with the
speech or music at the right ear, than for the opposite
condition. If the ear asymmetry effect reflects .cerebral
dominance, then this would agree with the idea that
temporal judgments are mediated by the left cerebral
hemisphere for both linguistic and nonlinguistic
situations.
The experiment is clearly worth repeating with
musically trained subjects sight-reading longer passages
of genuine music, as this would be more analogous to
the linguistic experiments.
REFERENCES
BENTON, A. L. The amusias. In M. Critchley & R. A.
Henson (Eds.), Music and the brain. London: Heinemann,
1977.
BERTELSON, P., & TrSSEYRE, F. Perceiving the sequence of speech
and non-speech stimuli. Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology. 1970, 22,653-662.
BERTELSON, P.. & TiSSEYRE, F. Lateral asymmetry in the per-
ceived sequence of speech and nonspeech stimuli. Perception
& Psychophysics, 1972, 11. 356·362.
BERTELSON. P., & TiSSEYRE, F. Set and lateral asymmetry in
the perceived sequence of speech and nonspeech. In P. M. A.
Rabbitt & S. Dornic (Eds.), Attention and performance V.
London: Academic Press, 1975. Pp. 11-19.
BEVER, T. G., & CHIARELLO, R. J. Cerebral dominance in
musicians and nonmusicians. Science, 1974, I8S, 537-539.
DAMASIO, A. R., & DAMASIO, H. Musical faculty and cerebral
dominance. In M. Critchley & R. A. Henson (Eds.), Music
and the brain. London: Heinemann, 1977. Pp. 141-155. •
EFRON, R. The effect of handedness on the perception of
simultaneity and temporal order. Brain, 1963. 86. 261-284.
FODOR, 1. A.. & BEVER, T. G. The psychological reality of
linguistic segments. Journal or Verbal Learning & Verbal
Behavior. 1%5. 4. 414-420.
GORDON, H. W. Hemispheric asymmetries in the perception of
musical chords. Cortex. 1970. 6, 387-398.
GORDON, H. W. Auditory specialization of the right and left
hemispheres. In M. Kinsbourne & W. L. Smith (Eds.),
174 GREGORY
Hemispheric disconnection and cerebral function. Springfield,
III: Thomas. 1974.
HALPERIN. Y .. NACHSHON, I.. & CARMON, A. Shift of ear
superiority in dichotic listening to temporally patterned non-
verbal stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
1973. 53.46-49.
KIMURA, D. Left-right differences in the perception of melodies.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 1964. 16,
355-358.
LADEFOGED. P .• & BROADBENT, D. E. Perception of sequence in
auditory events. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
1960. 12. 162-170.
LEVIN. H .• & KAPLAN, E. A. Grammatical structure and reading.
In H. Levin & J. P. Williams (Eds.), Basic studies on reading.
New York: Basic Books. 1970. Pp. 119·133.
MILNER, B. Laterality effects in audition. In V. B. Mountcastle
(Ed.), Interhemispheric relations and cerebral dominance.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. Pp. 177-195.
PAPC;UN. G .. KRAsHEN, S., TERBEEK. D .• REMINGTON, R .• &
HARSHMAN. R. Is the left hemisphere specialized for speech,
language and/or something else? Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America. 1974, 55,319-327.
REBER. A. S. Locating clicks in sentences: Left, center and
right. Perception & Psychophysics, 1973, 13. 133-138.
View publication stats
REBER, A. S., & ANDERSON, J. R.-The perception of clicks in
linguistic and nonlinguistic messages. Perception & Psycho-
physics. 1970, 8,81-89.
SLOBODA. J. A. The effect of item position on the likelihood
of identification by inference in prose reading and music
reading. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1976. 30. 228-237.
SLOBODA, 1. A. Phrase units as determinants of visual processing
in music reading. British Journal of Psychology, 1977, 68.
117-124.
TITCHENER, E. B. Lectures on the experimental psychology of the
thought processes. New York: Macmillan. 1909.
WYKE. M. A. Musical ability: A neuropsychological inter-
pretation. In M. Critchley & R. A. Henson (Eds.), Music
and the brain. London: Heinemann. 1977. Pp. 156-173.
NOTE
1. The results for the two speeds of tune were combined,
since any difference between them could not be separa ted
from order effects.
(Received for publication August 8,1977;
revision accepted May 9, 1978.)